The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

349 Pages·2013·2.64 MB·English

by  Robert D. Kaplan

Copyright © 2012 by Robert D. Kaplan
Maps copyright © 2012 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The preface contains material from four earlier titles by Robert D. Kaplan:
Soldiers of God (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1990), An Empire
Wilderness (New York: Random House, Inc., 1998),
Eastward to Tartary (New York: Random House, Inc., 2000), and
Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts (New York: Random House, Inc., 2007).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kaplan, Robert D.
The revenge of geography : what the map tells us about coming conflicts and the battle against
fate / by Robert D. Kaplan.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-67960483-9
1. Political geography. I. Title.
JC319.K335 2012
320.1′2—dc23 2012000655
www.atrandom.com
Title-spread image: © iStockphoto
Jacket design: Greg Mollica
Front-jacket illustrations (top to bottom): Gerardus Mercator, double hemisphere world map,
1587 (Bridgeman Art Library); Joan Blaeu, view of antique Thessaly, from the Atlas Maior, 1662
(Bridgeman Art Library); Robert Wilkinson, “A New and Correct Map
v3.1_r1
But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man’s
periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again
and to continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly
compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference
and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but
order will too, from time to time.
—Marguerite Yourcenar
Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface: FRONTIERS
Part I
VISIONARIES
Chapter I: FROM BOSNIA TO BAGHDAD
Chapter II: THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY
Chapter III: HERODOTUS AND HIS SUCCESSORS
Chapter IV: THE EURASIAN MAP
Chapter V: THE NAZI DISTORTION
Chapter VI: THE RIMLAND THESIS
Chapter VII: THE ALLURE OF SEA POWER
Chapter VIII: THE “CRISIS OF ROOM”
Part II
THE EARLY-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MAP
Chapter IX: THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPEAN DIVISIONS
Chapter X: RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND
Chapter XI: THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER
Chapter XII: INDIA’S GEOGRAPHICAL DILEMMA
Chapter XIII: THE IRANIAN PIVOT
Chapter XIV: THE FORMER OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Part III
AMERICA’S DESTINY
Chapter XV: BRAUDEL, MEXICO, AND GRAND STRATEGY
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Preface
FRONTIERS
A good place to understand the present, and to ask questions about the
future, is on the ground, traveling as slowly as possible.
As the first rank of domed hills appeared on the horizon, rippling
upward from the desert floor in northern Iraq, to culminate in ten-
thousand-foot massifs clothed in oak and mountain ash, my Kurdish
driver glanced back at the vast piecrust plain, sucked his tongue in
contempt, and said, “Arabistan.” Then, looking toward the hills, he
murmured, “Kurdistan,” and his face lit up. It was 1986, the pinnacle of
Saddam Hussein’s suffocating reign, and yet as soon as we penetrated
further into prisonlike valleys and forbidding chasms, the ubiquitous
billboard pictures of Saddam suddenly vanished. So did Iraqi soldiers.
Replacing them were Kurdish peshmergas with bandoliers, wearing
turbans, baggy trousers, and cummerbunds. According to the political
map, we had never left Iraq. But the mountains had declared a limit to
Saddam’s rule—a limit overcome by the most extreme of measures.
In the late 1980s, enraged at the freedom that these mountains had
over the decades and centuries ultimately granted the Kurds, Saddam
launched a full-scale assault on Iraqi Kurdistan—the infamous Al-Anfal
campaign—that killed an estimated 100,000 civilians. The mountains
were clearly not determinative. But they did serve as the backdrop—the
original fact—to this tragic drama. It is because of the mountains that
Kurdistan has to a significant extent now effectively seceded from the
Iraqi state.
Mountains are a conservative force, often protecting within their defiles
indigenous cultures against the fierce modernizing ideologies that have
too often plagued the flatlands, even as they have provided refuge for
Marxist guerrillas and drug cartels in our own era.1 The Yale
anthropologist James C. Scott writes that “hill peoples are best
understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over
the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making
projects in the valleys.”2 For it was on the plain where the Stalinist
regime of Nicolae Ceausescu really sank its teeth into the population.
Ascending the Carpathians several times in the 1980s, I saw few signs of
collectivization. These mountains that declare Central Europe’s rear door
were defined more by wood and natural stone dwellings than by
concrete and scrap iron, favorite material elements of Romanian
communism.
The Carpathians that girdle Romania are no less a border than the
mountains of Kurdistan. Entering the Carpathians from the west, from
the threadbare and majestically vacant Hungarian Puszta, marked by
coal-black soil and oceans of lemon-green grass, I began to leave the
European world of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and to gradually
make my way into the economically more deprived terrain of the former
Ottoman Turkish Empire. Ceausescu’s oriental despotism, so much more
oppressive than Hungary’s haphazard goulash communism, was,
ultimately, made possible by the ramparts of the Carpathians.
And yet the Carpathians were not impenetrable. For centuries traders
had thrived in their many passes, the bearers of goods and high culture
so that a poignant semblance of Central Europe could take root well
beyond them, in cities and towns like Bucharest and Ruse. But the
mountains did constitute an undeniable gradation, the first in a series in
an easterly direction, that would conclude finally in the Arabian and
Kara Kum deserts.
In 1999, I took a freighter overnight from the Azerbaijani capital of
Baku, on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, to Krasnovodsk in
Turkmenistan, on the eastern shore, the beginning of what the Sassanid
Persians in the third century . called Turkestan. I awoke to a spare,
A.D
abstract shoreline: whitish hutments against cliffs the clay color of
death. All the passengers were ordered to line up in single file in the
100-degree temperature before a peeling gate where a lone policeman
checked our passports. We then passed into a bare, broiling shed, where
another policeman, finding my Pepto-Bismol tablets, accused me of
smuggling narcotics. He took my flashlight and emptied the 1.5-volt
batteries onto the dirt floor. His expression was as bleak and untamed as
the landscape. The town that beckoned beyond the shed was shadeless
and depressingly horizontal, with little architectural hint of a material
culture. I suddenly felt nostalgia for Baku, with its twelfth-century
Persian walls and dream palaces built by the first oil barons, embellished
with friezes and gargoyles, a veneer of the West that despite the
Carpathians, the Black Sea, and the high Caucasus, refused to completely
die out. Traveling eastward, Europe had evaporated in stages before my
eyes, and the natural border of the Caspian Sea had indicated the last
stage, heralding the Kara Kum Desert.
Of course, geography does not demonstrate Turkmenistan’s
hopelessness. Rather, it signifies only the beginning of wisdom in the
search for a historical pattern: one of repeated invasions by Parthians,
Mongols, Persians, czarist Russians, Soviets, and a plethora of Turkic
tribes against a naked and unprotected landscape. There was the barest
existence of a civilization because none was allowed to permanently sink
deep roots, and this helps explain my first impressions of the place.
The earth heaved upward, and what had moments before seemed like a
unitary sandstone mass disintegrated into a labyrinth of scooped-out
riverbeds and folds reflecting gray and khaki hues. Topping each hill was
a slash of red or ocher as the sun caught a higher, steeper slope at a
different angle. Lifts of cooler air penetrated the bus—my first fresh taste
of the mountains after the gauzy heat film of Peshawar in Pakistan’s
NorthWest Frontier Province.3 By themselves, the dimensions of the
Khyber Pass are not impressive. The highest peak is under seven
thousand feet and the rise is rarely steep. Nevertheless, in under an hour
in 1987, I was transported through a confined, volcanic netherworld of
crags and winding canyons; from the lush, tropical floor of the Indian
Subcontinent to the cool, tonsured wastes of middle Asia; from a world
of black soil, bold fabrics, and rich, spicy cuisine to one of sand, coarse
wool, and goat meat.
But like the Carpathians, whose passes were penetrated by traders,